Red Hat acquired cloud application deployment and
management platform firm Makara to boost its platform-as-a-service credentials.
Red Hat and Makara executives discussed the acquisition during a morning phone
conference Nov. 30.
Red Hat has been "delivering scalable and flexible
cloud infrastructure" before cloud computing became popular, said Paul
Cormier, executive vice president and president of the Products and Technology
group at Red Hat. By acquiring Makara, the company will be able to deliver "portability
and interoperability" on the cloud, Cormier said.

With this acquisition, Red Hat has the pieces it needs to
enhance its PAAS
vision for the cloud. Makara offers an on-demand service hosted on Amazon EC2,
which will add cloud services to the Linux giant's long list of technology
offerings. More importantly, Red Hat can now "remove complexity" and "level
the playing field" for customers developing new applications and moving
existing applications to the cloud, said Scott Crenshaw, vice president and
general manager of the cloud business unit at Red Hat.

With the Makara platform, organizations can provision,
deploy, manage, monitor and scale Java and PHP applications to any public,
private or hybrid cloud, said Isaac Roth, CEO
and co-founder of Makara. The management software can transfer existing
applications, aggregate logs from all virtual machine instances into a single
persistent log, auto-scale applications when needed and control what resources
are being used, he said.
While Makara specializes in JBoss and PHP applications,
the platform also supports standard Java EE, Spring, Tomcast and LAMP, said
Roth.
Red Hat will be incorporating Makara's technologies into
the company's PAAS offerings, said Crenshaw.
Instead of having a separate Makara product for customers, the Cloud
Application Platform will integrate with JBoss
Enterprise Middleware infrastructure, and there will be Makara technologies
included in the upcoming Cloud Admin Portal, Cloud User Portal, PAAS
Automation Engine and Application Configuration Engine, he said.
Anyone interested in the platform can check out the free trial of the management software on
Makara's site, according to Crenshaw and Roth.
PAAS "needs to be
open, needs to be portable and needs to be comprehensive," said
Crenshaw.
With Red Hat PAAS,
developers will be able to take an existing application and just migrate it "unmodified"
and move it to any cloud, so long as the application works on Red Hat Linux and
supported middleware such as JBoss, said Roth.
Red Hat's primary goal is to deliver PAAS
that has "no vendor lock-in," since Makara lets organizations
implement the platform onto any virtualized infrastructure, whether that's
public clouds like Amazon EC2 or private clouds based on the likes of Red Hat
Enterprise Virtualization, Citrix Xen or VMware, said Crenshaw.
PAAS is an "essential"
component of Red Hat's Cloud Foundations strategy, unveiled earlier this year,
said Crenshaw.
Microsoft and VMware are the other software vendors
targeting both private and public clouds, although Crenshaw mentioned Microsoft
when he said Red Hat was one of the two companies that delivered the operating
system, the middleware layer and all the tools for developing the applications.
Both companies have been accused of locking customers onto their
platform.
Red Hat didn't need Makara to tout its open credentials,
since JBoss,
which Red Hat acquired in 2006, already supports PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby,
OCAML, C/C++, Java, Seam, Hibernate, Spring, Struts and Google Web Toolkit
applications, but it does add to its strength.
Red Hat has always promised choice to customers on how to
develop applications, and the integration of Makara's software onto the PAAS
architecture continues that tradition, said Crenshaw.